Microsoft has reversed its decision to limit the hot-reload feature to the paid Windows version of its .Net development tools. The open source community, who would like to see the feature in the open source, multiplatform variant Visual Studio Code, criticized it a lot.
Hot reload is a feature where programmers can immediately see changes to their code work in another window, instead of having to completely restart the application being developed. The feature is appreciated among programmers because it saves them a lot of time, especially in situations where they only want to make a small change in the code.
Microsoft decided last week to limit hot reload to Visual Studio, the freemium Windows version of its integrated development environment. This threw developers who use the open source variant of the tools, Visual Studio Code, which can run on Linux, for example, the wrong way. Not only because they like to use the feature, but because it already works cross-platform in a release candidate of the upcoming .Net 6. So Microsoft decided not only to prioritize the feature in Visual Studio, but took the opportunity to use it in Visual Studio Code, which was already there.
The pull request to remove the feature from dotnet watch and limit it to Visual Studio 2022 was also locked, allowing only people who actually work on the code to respond. In response, the community came up with its own pull request, to roll back the first pull request.
According to sources at The Verge, the decision was “of a business nature” made by Julia Liuson, head of Microsoft’s developer division. In addition, the site writes that the decision also led to dissatisfaction with Microsoft’s own employees. Microsoft declined to comment on that report to the site. In the blog post reversing the decision, the company only states that the code “was inadvertently removed from an attempt at scoping” and that the intent was “just not to use that code path.” Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 will be released on November 8.